"Game Changers Impacting and Igniting SME Businesses and Brands”

The future of business technology

Most companies believe that technology has changed the way in which they do business. This is notable because ten years ago they would have been more likely to confirm technology had speeded an existing process up – word processing made correcting and editing a typescript less laborious, and a spreadsheet would do some calculations, but the underlying processes were substantially the same.

Skip forward by a few years and the position changes drastically. The internet has made areas such as research and selling completely unrecogniseable. Other technologies that have emerged include customer relationship management, in which a customer can call any employee and their details can be flashed up on a screen so everyone knows what’s happening in a given account. This has led to offshoring, which has had a mixed press.

Speculating on what’s going to happen over the next few years is of course entertaining and is an area to be approached with many caveats. Devotees of old episodes of “Tomorrow’s World” will recall numerous predictions that never came true.

Nonetheless, some pieces of speculation appear more than reasonable. Everyone wants more mobility in their IT, and Gary Bullard, managing director of BT Global Services UK, concurs. “The success of the Blackberry has been phenomenal,” he says. “People are coming to expect to be able to get at their information wherever they are, across any device.” Well yes, but that’s not quite the step change that the internet provoked. “No, I think the internet fundamentally changed the way we do things and I can’t see that happening again in the short term.”

Others appear to agree. Tony Jones, VP of professional services for e-business company The Ivis Group, sees mobile and distributed technology in general shaping where rather than how business happens. “For the future we see technology allowing organisations to be far less centralised with greater collaboration across the enterprise with partners and customers,” he says. “From a technology viewpoint this requires high quality, standards based data and use of a Service Oriented paradigm for the implementation of new systems. These systems must be business user driven, not IT centric, and offer greater business agility.” Crucially he adds that this will mean IT suppliers knuckling down and understanding the needs of their customers rather than coming up with a technical ‘solution’ and looking for a problem to fit, which has historically been their approach.

The other thing slowing people down will be the rate at which larger companies might wish to upgrade to anything new if it is too radical a change. There is no consensus on when to upgrade to new technology but resistance to change is growing in the opinion of Alex Neihaus, marketing VP for Ipswitch. “We believe that large businesses are among the least likely to upgrade to new releases rapidly. Just consider the number still using Windows 2000 as their standard desktop operating system several years into Windows XP’s lifecycle,” he says. “The reason is simple: enterprise software systems are so layered with overlapping prerequisites and corequisites that no matter how hard a big business tries to mitigate risk in upgrading, the risk is still there. And it’s substantial.” He observes, ironically, that it’s actually the requests from the corporates that drive these changes they’re so reluctant to make.

David Chalmers of Macro 4 is another person to challenge the notion that change will be as rapid as it has been before. It’s a question, he suggests, of trust. “The technology to connect users to the services they want is, or soon will be, available. SMS based around 3G mobile devices, voice automated control, smaller devices providing ever greater embedded ‘intelligence’ in everything from cars to clothes – these are all short term,” he says. “However, in the post 9/11, post London attack world that we live in, just how much trust will there be between users and suppliers? Is the message, voice note, coat-based reminder that I have just received really from my bank, or is it from a fraudster posing as the supplier and trying to get me to provide information that can be used to access my money/information/life?”

So the majority are expecting small changes to existing processes. In Bullard’s view, which echoes those of most people contacted for this article, it’s not a question of a huge sweeping thing like the internet coming and altering business practice, but of business adopting technologies that are available now over a period of time. After all, the possible changes discussed above could all be done with existing technology this afternoon if a company wanted it.

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